The Environmental Movement’s Retreat From
Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998):

A First Draft of History

Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz
June 2001

"Explanations III"

 

The power of money
 Notes

 

We have saved until last the factor that journalists tend to consider first: the money. There are many observers —and players— in the 1990s who suggest that the shifts in population emphasis have more to do with the funding of environmental groups than any other factor. Certainly, there is evidence suggesting that money has been at least a significant factor. Of course, many of the other factors mentioned previously may have had a role in causing donors to act as they did.

By way of introduction, Professor T. Michael Maher, in his 1990s research on why journalists avoided the population angle in their environmental reporting, noted that others have commented on the inherent bias of the news media in favor of population growth: "Molotch (1976) even suggested that cities can best be understood as entities competing for population growth, with the city newspaper as chief cheerleader."212

In a very real sense, the entire environmental protection and natural resource conservation enterprise has been "sold" to the American public, 1) as a necessary response to the unintended, adverse environmental consequences of this century’s unparalleled growth in consumption and population, but also, 2) in a great paradox, as an indispensable basis for still more growth in consumption and population, which (it is argued) depends on a healthy environment and abundant resources. In the last thirty years, the environmental sector of the nation’s economy has boomed in tandem with new environmental protection laws reflecting both increased pressures on the environment and greater environmental awareness on the part of the public. To the ranks of foresters, fish and game biologists, geologists, agronomists, and park rangers —resource management professions which have existed for much of this century— were added tens of thousands of pollution control engineers, environmental lawyers, landscape architects, outdoor recreation specialists, environmental planners, wildlife biologists, environmental scientists (e.g. climatologists, geochemists, ecologists, zoologists, conservation biologists, oceanographers), government regulators, and last but not least, professional or career environmental advocates.

To the extent that increasing population signifies increasing pressures on environmental resources, the demand for environmental professionals to manage and mitigate the negative effects of this growth will also increase. (There are several caveats: American society must be affluent enough and motivated enough to pay for such services, and the resources can’t have been exhausted or ruined beyond the point of no return; once a species goes extinct so do the jobs of those who tried to save it.) Thus, paradoxically, continued population growth —at least to a point and for awhile— creates more demand for the skills and expertise (and thus better job prospects) of those in the environmental conservation field. This can be seen in a pair of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service publications, one of which states: "Although fish and wildlife in America represent tremendous environmental, recreational and economic assets, these resources are increasingly threatened. The mission of the U.S. Fish Wildlife Service grows more complex and critical as a result of these threats."213

And why are fish and wildlife increasingly threatened? Another Fish and Wildlife Service document spells it out: "Because of the changes that accompany development and population growth."214 The solution? It should come as no surprise that a federal agency in the 1990s does not mention stabilizing U.S. population as one essential part of the solution. Instead, this agency concludes that "wildlife and wildlands need to be protected and managed."215 In effect, these observations from one branch of the environmental profession serve to justify its own increasing importance to American society.

In theory, the same case can be made about the full-time, career environmentalists who head up and staff national environmental organizations. Membership and support for those organizations tend to grow in direct proportion with the real or perceived threat to the environment, as during the early 1980s under the Reagan administration. U.S. population growth increases the real threat to the American environment; ergo, until or unless that growth damages the environment beyond salvation, it is a boon for these groups’ membership appeals and donation solicitations. The recent sprawl campaigns of various organizations —which attempt to spell "sprawl" without the ‘p’ representing population (as Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization cleverly put it)— are a prime example of a greater loyalty to organizational well-being than the environment’s well-being.

On the more specific question of the direct influence of money on the retreat of environmental groups from U.S. population stabilization, historians will need to be investigative reporters to get a clear picture. Here are some of the questions we would like to see answered.

Question:

Did the "business" of environmentalism make population stabilization programs unattractive? Is it possible that organizations looked first not at what ultimately would allow them to achieve their environmental goals but at defining themselves for the best financial support from their members and their foundation or corporate benefactors —and stabilization didn’t meet that criterion?


Organizational survival and financial maintenance is not a trivial matter. Taking on "environmentally pure" issues won’t do much good for the environment if in the process the organization loses the financial ability to stay in business.

With scores of environmental groups competing with each other for members and donors, each needs special programs and actions to distinguish itself. They also need programs that can yield short-term victories that they can tout to their funders. Even under very favorable circumstances, a campaign for U.S. population stabilization cannot achieve its goal for several decades. And the benefits are not easily seen at first. In contrast, many other environmental crusades bring about faster, more tangible results. To refer to an earlier example, the Chesapeake Bay today is healthier or at least holding its own in measurable ways (e.g. improved water quality; increased submerged aquatic vegetation; stabilized or increasing fish, shellfish and waterfowl populations) directly as a result of a number of environmental initiatives.

Stabilizing population, on the other hand, doesn’t improve the environment; rather, it keeps environmental conditions from growing worse. You can’t photograph the bad things that you prevented —because they didn’t happen. Which direct mail package is likely to raise more money: Newspaper clippings about forcing the removal of a dam, cleaning up smog and establishing a park...or a headline stating that the rate of population growth declined incrementally from the previous year?

In 1990, after Congress approved an immigration policy that would force U.S. population growth of tens of millions over the next several decades, one of the authors surveyed the Washington, D.C. offices of national environmental groups. They were asked to name their organization’s top five issues facing America. None named population growth. (This may account for why not one of the big groups testified or lobbied against the 1990 forced-growth legislation.216) When reminded about population, most of the environmental spokespersons quickly said that, of course, population growth was a very important environmental threat. But it was a long-term problem, while their organization had to focus on crises that needed immediate attention —like keeping a shopping mall from wiping out a wetland or saving a virgin forest from being clear-cut. The benefits from population stabilization were too indirect and diffuse to make it a brochure issue; and the damage from growth was too incremental to say that it had to be attacked immediately.

John Bermingham, a former Colorado legislator, ZPG board member, and one of the nation’s pioneers and long-term stalwarts for stabilization, told the story of approaching a large environmental group to "put some muscle" behind the strong population policy it had on paper. The president told him the group couldn’t work on the issue and noted: "That is not to say that population issues do not have a direct effect on what we do, particularly in the area of promoting sustainability. Population is just not our forte and we cannot afford to divert our limited resources to it."217

Long-term population analyst and observer Lindsey Grant concluded that major non-profit environmental organizations know that population growth hinders the pursuit of environmental goals, but that, most "stayed away from the U.S. population issue out of concern that it would be controversial and lose support for their programs."218

The farther the environmental groups got from Earth Day 1970, the less business sense it may have made to spend organizational resources on stabilization efforts.

The 1998 edition of the catalogue Environmental Grant-Making Foundations (Rochester, NY: Resources for Global Sustainability, Inc.) lists 180 foundations that specify population as an area of environmental gift-giving. In recent years, billionaires Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett in addition to well-endowed foundations like Hewlett and Packard have all identified overpopulation as a major concern and focus of gift-giving. Yet these and most other foundations interested in underwriting population programs have a distinctly global perspective and are focused on family planning, women’s empowerment and reproductive health issues, not population policy, especially a U.S. population stabilization policy.

The experience of the 1990s has shown that there are fewer than 10 foundations in the entire country willing and able to significantly fund non-profit groups with a clear U.S. population stabilization agenda. Most of these are relatively small in size, and thus limited in the size of their grants.

Even a respected, well-established group like the National Audubon Society has had to struggle to obtain support for its wildlife habitat-related population program. For at least the last three decades of the 20th century, Audubon has had the most active population education program of any major environmental group, encouraged by the early support of its former president Russell Peterson. It included widely respected research and education about the effects of population growth on natural habitats throughout the United States and the world. But when it came to advocating policies to stop or slow the growth, Audubon pled the fifth. U.S. population stabilization depends on reductions in immigration, and few foundations want to be associated with that.

Audubon members asking about the issue were told in 1998 that, "Audubon does not now, nor never has, taken a position on immigration reform." Yet in one of the many ironies surrounding the immigration/population question, famed ornithologist and bird artist Roger Tory Peterson, a major conservation figure who inaugurated the popular field guide series and certainly had the admiration of many in the Audubon Society, was himself on the board of advisors of the Federation of American Immigration Reform for many years before his death.

Question:

How significant was the threat of foundations and major individual donors to withdraw funding if an environmental or population group tackled immigration?

 

In his book Living Within Limits, Garrett Hardin asserted that the corporate and philanthropic foundations who funded the 20th anniversary Earth Day in 1990 let it be known that they would not look kindly on the event having a population emphasis.219 So in contrast to Earth Day 1970, there was none.

By 1998, the situation was no better, prompting one Oregon population activist to decry "McEarth Day 98" as a "Corporate Snowjob." According to a flier of the grassroots group "Too Many People...Too Little Earth!": "You’d think [overpopulation] would be number one in the environmental community. Tragically, it’s hardly on the back burner!... Why the head in the sand approach? The reasons are many; I’ll list a few.

Fund raising becomes very difficult when population enters the picture. What corporation really wants to solve this problem? They thrive on unsustainable growth."220

During the Sierra Club battle over population policy in 1998, Sierra leaders warned that foundations and major individual donors had said that they would withdraw hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously pledged grants if the members of the Club took a stand in favor of reducing immigration.221

Historians should investigate rumors that other organizations were subjected to similar overt or implicit pressures.222 For example, according to one ZPG member, in 1998 ZPG’s executive director indicated privately to her that ZPG had received a major grant from a large foundation, which specified, "Don’t get involved in the immigration issue." When contacted at a later date by a different population activist, that foundation denied that it attached any such conditions to its grants. ZPG’s executive director also denied that any strings were attached to grants received. And yet, according to another ZPG official at the time, the executive director indicated that at ZPG’s gala event in 1997 honoring Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, both major ZPG supporters, Fonda had informed him how happy she was that ZPG had not taken a stand on immigration.223

Perhaps this explains why two letters sent to Turner and Fonda as well as Peter Bahouth, executive director of the Turner Foundation, by Joyce Tarnow, president of Floridians for Sustainable Population, asking them to urge ZPG to address immigration, were never answered.224

To what extent did large funders help keep population/immigration issues off the agendas of environmental organizations? There are certainly enough clues and circumstantial evidence to indicate that they played an important role.

Question:

How was the desire of many corporate and business interests for continued U.S. population growth reflected in their grants to environmental groups and through the foundations they set up or the foundations on the boards of which their leaders served?


It may be that the greatest fear that corporations had of environmental groups was not the ostensible environmental regulations they advocated but a cutoff of U.S. population growth to fuel ever-expanding consumer markets, land development and construction. In addition, those same forces had an intense self-interest in a growing labor pool to keep the cost of labor down.

One Californian observed that to remain so large, environmental groups "depend on huge transfers of money from foundations. These foundations have lots of connections with the national corporate community, which remains unconvinced that U.S. population stabilization is a good thing. Never-ending growth remains a goal of the national corporate community."225

For more than a quarter-century the total fertility rate of native-born Americans has been below the replacement level of 2.1 The inevitable demographic consequence of this reproductive behavior is a native population stock whose growth has been tapering off, and is well on the way to stabilization and even gradual shrinkage in the coming century —without infusions of foreign workers and their families. Organized business and corporate interests in the United States fear that a tighter labor supply and a "stagnant" number of consumers will choke off America’s miracle of perpetual economic growth and prosperity.

"As baby boomers age and domestic birthrates stagnate, only foreign-born workers will keep the labor pool growing....Economic dynamism, in other words, will depend on a continuing stream of foreign-born workers," opined an article in Business Week.226 At a "dull" meeting between the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a group of trade association executives in December 1997, "suddenly the room jumped to life" when Bruce Josten of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce predicted a severe labor shortage within the next decade. "...we’re going to have to bring in more people simply to maintain the economy’s growth rate. I’m talking about more legal immigrants at all skill levels," said Josten.227 The Chamber’s Vice President and Chief Economist echoed this view in a letter published under the headline "Immigrants Wanted" in The New York Times: "Rather than worrying about the welfare costs of our current rate of immigration, we should be concerned about the lost opportunity owing to the worker shortage of the future."228

The concern of some economists and business interests over an alleged emerging worker shortage is matched by the concern of many analysts, politicians, and rank-and file Americans that early in the next century the Social Security system will be strained to the breaking point as too many retiring Baby Boomers burden too few workers. Dell Erickson and others have used the metaphor of a large lump of food passing through a snake to depict the pronounced, but temporary, demographic distortions caused by the Boomers.229 (As a population gradually stops growing, its age structure will indeed change, with the median age shifting upward for a time to a new, higher point.) This issue was addressed on the Sierra Club’s on-line Population Forum, with forum manager Nan Hildreth asking participants: "Someone mentioned that US population growth is good for the continued solvency of Social Security. Comments?"230 Dell Erickson commented that, "Over the years, the legislation to open a floodgate of immigration became an unseen and little known Congressional attempt to remedy the approaching funding dilemma by rapidly increasing numbers at the bottom of the worker pyramid."231

Demographer David Simcox also delivered a scathing critique of this rationale for increasing immigration: "Relying on Ponzi-like schemes to populate our way out of the dilemma through increased immigration and pronatalist incentives would be destructive and self-defeating. The consequence would be disruptive and environmentally devastating population growth, which would merely delay, not solve, the problem of too few workers supporting too many retirees."232 It should be obvious that reliance upon a pyramid scheme of an ever-expanding base of workers to keep our economy healthy and our retirees robust is an environmentally unsustainable strategy, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t powerful forces pushing precisely for this.

Whatever the unspoken basis for its unwillingness to confront population growth, the Sierra Club national board found itself in the previously unheard-of position of being endorsed by the Home Builders Association of Northern California during the 1998 referendum campaign. The development group applauded the position of the Sierra Club board to accept the current immigration level, which is projected to force California’s home-needing population to 50 million by 2025. But the developers criticized the Sierra Club for helping prevent the use of urban and near-urban open spaces to build houses for the population growth brought about by immigration.233

Many foundations have a mix of directors that include politically left-leaning globalists and right-leaning representatives of multi-national corporations. As discussed earlier, for separate (even disparate) reasons, both types are strongly inclined toward high immigration levels. Historians will be able to quantify some of the ideological leanings of the foundations by looking at the modest level of funding for U.S. population stabilization efforts compared to the millions of dollars a year funneled to organizations working for policies that force massive U.S. population growth.

Of particular interest may be determining the role of foundations during the mid-1990s when Congress almost approved immigration reductions that would have started the United States on the path toward a stable population. That was a time when the American public was clamoring for immigration reductions; liberal labor advocates pressed for cuts that were endorsed by President Clinton; the Republican chairmen of the House and Senate immigration subcommittees presented bills to bring about the cuts recommended by former Democratic congresswoman Barbara Jordan’s bi-partisan national commission. But the reductions did not occur. News accounts credit a massive mobilization and lobbying effort by corporate America for defeating all immigration cuts.

Corporate, ethnic, and human rights leaders worked in a diverse coalition to begin undercutting the residual interest for making cuts in upcoming sessions of Congress. Of special concern to growth advocates was the possibility that environmental groups might join forces with those desiring cuts for the sake of low-skill workers.

Several Democratic pro-cut House floor leaders (most prominently Anthony Beilenson of California and John Bryant of Texas) had especially emphasized the need to slow U.S. population growth and relieve pressures on the environment. Around that time, certain foundations supported programs to bring human rights and environmental groups together to discuss population issues. To many observers, it appeared that foundations were pressing environmental groups (which they funded) to compromise with immigrant rights groups (which they also funded) by agreeing to step away from any advocacy for reductions in immigrant-driven U.S. population growth. Did those programs influence the decisions of ZPG and the Sierra Club to change their U.S. population stabilization policies and of groups like Audubon firming up their policies to refrain from discussing immigration issues?

Three well-endowed foundations —Pew, Turner, and Rockefeller— gave grants in support of a book whose very title —Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption, and the Environment234 revealed a shift away from sheer numbers of people as the primary concern. And in November, 1995, in Washington, D.C., the Pew Global Stewardship Initiative co-sponsored a one-day "Roundtable Discussion on Global Migration, Population, and the Environment." Pew’s partner in the event was the National Immigration Forum, the nation’s main coalition lobbying for continued high immigration. According to Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, who was present, this meeting was "clearly an attempt to keep environmental groups from going off the reservation and supporting immigration cuts then being debated in Congress."235

To whatever extent foundations and corporations did or did not attempt to neutralize environmental groups in their population policies, historians are likely to find that the policy changes also came as a result of the many other factors listed in this monograph.

By the end of the 1990s, after three decades of spiraling immigration numbers, seemingly perpetual population growth, and defeat after political defeat, many longsuffering environmental and population activists despaired about ever reversing environmentalists’ paralysis on immigration: "After working on the ‘sustainable numbers’ problem for years, Judith Kunofsky is convinced that reducing immigration has become increasingly impossible politically —that we may have already reached the point where we can’t do anything about it," wrote behavioral scientist Diana Hull.236

Perhaps nothing was more symbolic of organized environmentalism’s virtual abandonment of U.S. population stabilization from 1970 to the present than its disregard of the oft-stated message of the venerated "father" of Earth Day 1970 himself, Senator Gaylord Nelson. Even as environmental groups increasingly distanced themselves from the population issue, Nelson’s concern with U.S. overpopulation through the years never wavered, and his speeches around the country on environmental sustainability spotlighted the U.S. population problem.237 A newspaper article describing an Earth Day 1998 speech began: "Senator Gaylord Nelson spoke to a standing-room only audience at Beloit College’s Richardson Auditorium [in his home state of Wisconsin], advocating the U.S. limit immigration before U.S. resources are depleted."238 Later that year, in a Washington, D.C. press conference, Nelson bristled at the idea that what really motivates attempts to limit immigration is racism. He said that such accusations only served to silence a debate that was long overdue: "We ought to discuss it in a rational way. We have to decide if we’re going to be comfortable with half a billion people or more."239

Yet not even the Father of Earth Day’s irreproachable reputation, peerless stature and acute concern swayed environmental group leaders.

Historians need to explain how an environmental issue as fundamental as U.S. population growth could have moved from center-stage within the American environmental movement to virtual obscurity in just 20 years. For the American environment itself, the ever-growing demographic pressures ignored by the environmental establishment showed no signs of abating on their own as the nation prepared to enter the 21st century.

Yet a ray of hope remains. "If the people lead, the leaders will follow" says an aphorism. The growing grassroots concern of numerous rank-and-file environmentalists and ordinary Americans with the multiple problems unavoidably aggravated by overpopulation and overimmigration may yet overturn their leaders’ stubborn denial of demographic and ecological realities. In the face of unremitting hostility, demagoguery and dirty tricks on the part of the Sierra Club bureaucracy, Sierrans who refused to accept their leaders’ acquiescence to rapid, unending U.S. population growth attained a respectable 40% showing. This may yet be a harbinger of the return to a realistic, comprehensive population policy within the mainstream environmental movement.


Notes

212. Supra, note 20.
213. Jamie Rappaport Clark and John Rogers. 1997. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: 1997. Strategic Plan, September 30, 1997 – September 30, 2002. U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service. p. 1. Clark and Rogers are the Director and Assistant Director of this federal agency, respectively.
214. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Undated. DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge Concept Plan. p. 17.
215 Ibid.
216. Lindsey Grant. 1994. "The Timid Crusade." NPG Forum Series. Washington, D.C.: Negative Population Growth.
217. John Bermingham. 1998. Personal communication.
218. Supra, note 61.
219. Garrett Hardin. 1993. Living Within Limits. New York: Oxford University Press.
220. Supra, note 200.
221. Alan Kuper. 1998. Personal communication based on meeting with Sierra Club executive director.
222. Private correspondence.
223. Ibid.
224. Joyce Tarnow. 1997. August 9 letter to Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. October 13 letter to Peter Bahouth.
225. William E. Murray. 1998. E-mail to Roy Beck. December 8.
226. Howard Gleckman. 1998. "A Rich Stew in the Melting Pot." Business Week, August 31.
227. Supra, note 181; Miller article.
228. Martin Regalia. 1999. "Immigrants Wanted" (Letter to the Editor). The New York Times, April 8.
229. Dell Erickson. 1999. E-mail to the authors, June 1. Excerpts from a 1995 paper entitled "Social Security: The American Tragedy."
230. Nan Hildreth. 1998. Post to Sierra Club Population Forum <CONS-SPST-POPULATION@LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG> June 17.
231. Dell Erickson. 1998. Post to Sierra Club Population Forum <CONS-SPST-POPULATION@LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG> July 3.
232. David Simcox. 1998. "Social Security: The Ponzi Path to Dystopia." NPG Forum Series, October. Washington, D.C.: Negative Population Growth.
233. Supra, note 207.
234. Laurie Ann Mazur (ed.). 1994. Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption, and the Environment. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
235. Mark Krikorian. 1999. Personal communication.
236. Supra, note 202.
237. Gaylord Nelson. 1997. "Environment – Population – Sustainable Development: Where Do We Go From Here?" Focus, Vol. 7, No. 2. Washington, D.C.: Carrying Capacity Network. Text of speech delivered to Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 15, 1997.
238. Pat Carome. 1998. "Environment Humanity’s No. 1 Challenge." Beloit Daily News, April 23.
239. Bob Vitale. 1998. "Gaylord Nelson says population growth injures environment." Oshkosh Northwestern. December 14.

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[MFS note: works of several of the cited authors are available on the "Sustainability Authors" page here; for two directly related items on the MFS Website, see "How and Why Journalists Avoid the Population – Environment Connection" and Powerdown.]
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* Used with permission of the authors.